Community

Andrew Pettigrew

Emeritus Professor of Strategy and Organisation

Profile tabs

Profile

Andrew Pettigrew is Professor of Strategy and Organisation at Saïd Business School and Senior Golding Fellow at Brasenose College, both at the University of Oxford. He is a leading expert on strategy and change in both the public and private sectors. He launched his career with a highly-regarded ten-year study of chemical company ICI, connecting economic business research with a broader sociological approach. He has revolutionised the study of organisational development by combining historical, political and social contextual information with statistical and quantitative data.

Andrew’s current research interests include the management of strategic change processes within organisations and the relationship between leadership, change and performance.

Andrew’s background in sociology and anthropology, where contextual and historical study are vital, informs his research methodology. Andrew believes that his work is to ‘catch reality in flight’ and to ‘give time to time’, encouraging researchers to emulate historians and ‘reconstruct past contexts, processes, and decisions’.

Alongside his pure research, Andrew is concerned with practice and has been engaged internationally in consulting and advisory roles, from consulting on strategic change and management in the NHS to working with the boards of top corporations. He is Chairman of the Academic Sounding Board for McKinsey’s worldwide organisation practice.

Andrew also studies the processes, practices and performance of collaborative academic research, addressing the ways business schools and researchers themselves deal with decision-making, innovation and strategic change management. He works with both the European Foundation for Management Development (EMFD) and the UK’s Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) to understand and improve research in the social sciences and management.

Andrew is author or co-author of 15 books and over 100 journal articles. He is recognised within the management community as one of the foremost researchers and practitioners in strategy and change management.

In 2003 Andrew became only the third business school professor to be made a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy of Management, and the US Academy of Management. He is also the only non-North American to be named a Distinguished Scholar of the US Academy of Management. He is the recipient of a Richard Whipp Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Academy of Management, and in 2009 he was awarded an OBE for services to higher education.

Andrew has a degree in sociology at Liverpool University, and a PhD in industry sociology from Manchester Business School. Andrew lectured at Yale before returning to the UK, where he launched the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change at Warwick University in 1985 and served as Dean of the University of Bath’s School of Management until he joined Saïd Business School in 2008.

Andrew has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Linkoping in Sweden (1989), University of Liverpool (2010) and Copenhagen Business School (2010).

Expertise:

Management of strategic change processes

Relationship between leadership, change and performance

Processes, practices and performance of collaborative research

Andrew’s work has covered a broad range of sectors, both public and private, but it has consistently concentrated on the contextual study of corporate evolution, decision-making, strategy and governance. His approach emphasises the environmental and historical factors that work alongside quantitative economic issues to shape an organisation.

Strategy and Organisational Change: Theory and Method

Most recently Andrew has conducted ESRC-funded studies of the boards of the UK’s top 500 companies as well as new forms of organising and performance in Europe, Japan and the USA.

Andrew takes a unique approach to the study of organisational systems. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he worked on a major project gathering empirical data representing the management of change at ICI, a chemicals company. The research led to a major publication, and helped Andrew develop an approach to management research that combines multiple levels of analysis – not just economical, but also social, political and sector-based – with both historical and current data to provide an accurate long-term analysis of change and strategy.

Leading Organisational Change and the Management of Performance in the NHS

Andrew has focused much of his work on the health sector, advising the UK government on the National Health Service and its other health initiatives. In 2002 he was asked to summarise the results of his research on the NHS for the Prime Minister. In 2000 he operated as an adviser to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and in the 1990s was a member of the Functions and Manpower Review Committee.

Scholarly Impact in the Social Sciences

Over the past decade, Andrew has played a growing role within the academic business world. He works with the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) and the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as well as within Oxford to determine the best ways of measuring and encouraging scholarly impact within the discipline.

Engagement

Andrew’s work has always been concerned with practice and he has been active internationally in consultancy and advisory roles, from consulting on strategic change and management in the NHS, to working with the boards of top corporations.

Andrew has worked closely with McKinsey for many years, and he currently serves as Chairman of the Academic Sounding Board for McKinsey’s worldwide organisation practice. Recently he has developed the Oxford/McKinsey international Scholarly Seminar Series, which brings top scholars from around the world to Oxford and facilitates debate involving faculty, senior Directors of McKinsey and Saїd Business School alumni.

Andrew serves as the Research and Development Committee Chair of the EFMD. The Foundation’s 800 members represent business schools around the world, and Andrew has played a key role in launching a research initiative on institutional development and performance in business schools. The study will look at why certain schools outperform others, as well as how leadership and change affect the schools – starting in Europe, but eventually including all business schools around the world.

Andrew has also played a key role in the work of the UK’s ESRC, studying how best to represent the quality and impact of social science research in the UK. He chaired the ESRC’s Evaluation and Audit Committees, and his work with the ESRC contributed to the inclusion of impact measurements in the Research Excellence Framework.

Teaching

Andrew teaches the Leading Strategic Change course on the MBA programme. The course is a popular elective that explores leadership during times of change as well as managing businesses in a turbulent environment. By studying leadership and change theory through Andrew’s unique contextual approach, students learn to appreciate the importance of corporate leadership through major change. This framework is applied through case studies and visiting executives.